Black and grey realistic rose with swirling scrollwork and stylised lettering on a person's upper back.

Shaded rose with scrollwork on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large shaded rose with an open bloom sits at the centre of the design, with soft grey gradients across the petals. Ornate swirls and flourishes surround the rose, and stylised lettering sits above and below it. The piece is in black and grey with a few faint pinkish tones in the skin, and it fills the frame across the upper back.

Realism Botanical Back Rose Scrollwork Lettering Flourish Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife would not have the rose planted on the seaward side, so Tomas dug the bed in the lee of the tower, where the salt could not reach it, and hauled soil up from the mainland in sacks until his back gave out.

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The rose came up grey. Everyone in Skerrow said so. It was not the pink of a christening or the red of a grudge but the colour of the sea under cloud, and it opened only in the hours after the lamp was lit. Ruth would sit on the step with her mending and count the petals as they turned. She said the scrolls of leaf around its stem were the sound the wind made in the gallery rail, and she had written them down so she would not lose them.

Letters came up with it, two strange shapes cut into the lintel stone by a mason nobody had hired. Tomas read them first as a name and then as a warning. In the end he read them as a date, the night his brother's boat went past the rocks without a light. He had not lit the lamp that night. He had gone down to the boathouse and sat with his hands between his knees until morning.

That autumn the rose bloomed in full for the first time. Ruth cut a bowl of it and set it on the sill facing the water, and when the lamp swung round it threw the shadow of each petal across the whitewashed wall, grey on grey, so that from the sea the tower looked lit from within by something that had decided to stay.